Perception, Imagination, and Demonstrative Reference: A Sellarsian Account (original) (raw)

'Imagination and the Unity of Experience: Kant, Sellars, and the Objects of Perception'

This paper spells out the implications of a two-component analysis of perceptual experience, developing ideas about the productive imagination that are sketched out in Sellars's late paper 'The Role of Imagination in Kant's Theory of Experience' (1978). It is argued that the phenomenal and intentional aspects of experience are unified through the role of the imagination. There are two dimensions in the exercise of concepts in experience. In order to be perceptually conscious, the perceiving subject must exercise at least some low-level classificatory concepts about the objects taken to be perceived. At the same time the subject becomes implicitly prepared for changes to the inner phenomenal aspects of their perceptual consciousness. The activity of the imagination in experience, through the construction of "sense-image-models", enables the subject to anticipate future possible experiences, corresponding to different perspectival views of the outer objects perceived. A range of problematic kinds of perceptual experiences are examined in detail, including hallucinations of various kinds, displaced perception, and double vision. The application of the two-component analysis of experience to such cases leads to a proper understanding of what takes place in normal perception. and provides a consistent explanation of a whole range of perceptual phenomena. When subjects exercise concepts focusing on the objective properties of the external environment, the inner phenomenal character of their experience is projected onto outer objects. It is shown how a critical realist version of the causal theory of perception makes much better sense of perceptual phenomena than any other theory of experience, and is compatible with a common-sense understanding of the directness of perception.

Perception in Kant's Model of Experience

2012

In order to secure the limits of the critical use of reason, and to succeed in the critique of speculative metaphysics, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) had to present a full account of human cognitive experience. Perception in Kant’s Model of Experience is a detailed investigation of this aspect of Kant’s grand enterprise with a special focus: perception. The overarching goal is to understand this common phenomenon both in itself and as the key to understanding Kant’s views of experience. In the process, the author argues against any such reading of Kant that puts too much emphasis on concepts and understanding in perception. This means that claims of the sort that intuitions cannot play their role without concepts, that sensibility cannot bring anything to cognition without being mediated through the functions of understanding, or that there is no such thing as concept-independent perception, are shown to be either plainly false or misleading at best. Together with the contemporary topics examined by the end of the book, the findings suggest how the role of conceptual thinking in human cognition has been exaggerated partly because of a misplaced interpretation of Kant, which not only makes perception far more intellectual in character than what was intended by Kant himself, but distorts Kant’s account of cognition by overlooking what there is at the heart of his critical philosophy: the revaluation of sensible cognition.

The Contents of Perceptual Experience: A Kantian Perspective

The Contents of Perceptual Experience: A Kantian Perspective, 2014

When I observe a scene around me, I perceive a number of objects: I can see my desk with a pile of books and papers on it (in slight disarray), some writing implements and a notebook; I can hear a car passing the nearby road and friends chatting outside my window; I can sense the smell of freshly baked bread and feel the smoothness of my cat's fur. What are the objects of my perception-in general? Surely, I can think about these objects, as well as imagine them. But there must be something in perception that makes it different from other mental states, acts or processes, such as thinking or imagining. For example, smelling a rose is different from merely thinking about a rose. When you smell a rose, you have certain sensations that you would not have if you were merely thinking about it. Moreover, you would not know what the scent of rose is like, you would not be able to recognize it as coming from your garden, and to tell it apart from the scent of lilacs that grow next to roses, if you did not have a perceptual experience of a rose. Accordingly, philosophers have claimed that what distinguishes perception from other kinds of mental states, acts, or processes, is its content. Since the objects that can be perceived can also be thought about or imagined, perceptual content is a special way or mode in which objects can be given, or presented, to us in experience or, more broadly, cognition. Let us call this view the content view (CV).23 On the CV, cognitive access to objects would be regarded as mediated, rather than direct. The role of the intermediary would be played by representational content. This view is deeply rooted in the history of philosophy, for example in the debates between direct and indirect realists, such as Thomas Reid, on the one hand, and John Locke, on the other.24 The latter, also known as representationists, would claim that "ideas," which would be characterized as mind-dependent, or existing "in" the mind, mediate access to all kinds of objects. The standard objection raised against the CV states that it encourages skepticism about the properties of the objects outside the 23 For a discussion and critique of the view, see: B.

The notion of sensation in Sellars' theory of perception

European Journal Of Philosophy, 2021

This paper reconstructs Sellars' theory of "sensation" or "sense impression", positioning it in relation to his theoretical distinction between the Manifest and Scientific Image. Though Sellars' account of "sensation" has been a widely neglected part of his thought, it is central not only to his theory of perception but also to understanding his confrontation with traditional accounts of sensing (from Descartes to C.I. Lewis and Husserl). In this article, I first show that Sellars' argument for introducing the notion of "sensation" into his theoretical system should be understood as distinctly explanatory, rather than transcendental or phenomenological. After outlining this argument and analyzing its significance, I explore Sellars' adverbialist construal of "sensation" and its implications in relation to contemporaneous and current forms of adverbialism. Finally, in the last part of the paper, I illuminate how Sellars situates his conceptual framework for "sensations" (correctly understood) in the Manifest Image theory of perception. Highlighting Sellars' understanding of the process by which the Manifest Image substitutes sensation in the Scientific Image, I clarify Sellars' obscure notion of "sensa", then conclude with a comprehensive account of his stereoscopic view of the phenomenon of sensing.

Conceptualism and Non-Conceptualism in Kant's Theory of Experience1

2013

Discussions about not conceptualism, i.e. on the possibility or even the necessity of the existence of mental representations that may refer to or describe the world without using concepts, have been frequent in contemporary philosophical debate about perception and cognition. In this paper I intend to examine some central points of this discussion in the light of Kant's theory of the experience as developed in the Critique of Pure Reason, with the dual aim of exploring how Kant's proposals may help to elucidate or even decide some of the crucial issues involved in this debate, and, conversely, how the analytical and conceptual refinement produced by this contemporary debate can provide some clues for the interpretation of Kantian philosophy. Special attention will be devoted to the works of Wilfrid Sellars and Robert Hanna. I Conceptualism and Non-Conceptualism Non-conceptualism consists in the thesis that perceiving beings may represent the world (refer to or describe obje...

O’Shea, J (2018) ‘Sellars’s Interpretive Variations on Kant’s Transcendental Idealist Themes’

Luca Corti and Antonio Nunziante, eds. (2018), _Sellars and The History of Modern Philosophy_, 2018

ABSTRACT: Sellars’ career-long engagement with Kant’s philosophy involved both readings of Kant and appropriations of Kant that are nuanced, original, and related in complex ways to Sellars’ own philosophical views. In some ways similar to Strawson’s classic reading, Sellars defended Kant’s theory of experience and his analysis of human knowledge as essentially correct. This includes various views on the nature of conceptual cognition, the thinking self, practical reason, perceptual experience, and the lawfulness of nature. On the other hand, and again like Strawson, Sellars regarded Kant’s transcendental idealism as involving a strong ontological commitment to unknowable but thinkable (and non-spatiotemporal) ‘things in themselves’. However, whereas Strawson regarded such a position as deeply incoherent, Sellars argues that Kant’s theological conception of things in themselves can coherently be replaced with a scientific realist conception of things in themselves as theoretically postulated imperceptible processes, which play a structurally similar role for Sellars in grounding the Kantian-phenomenal ‘appearances’ in the ‘manifest image’ of the world. Sellars’ highly complex but sophisticated reading of Kant on sensibility and intuition, when combined with Sellars’ own idiosyncratic views on sensory qualia, render it even more difficult to come to terms with Sellars’ engagements with Kant’s idealism. This chapter attempts to provide a concise presentation and evaluation of certain central themes in Sellars’ complex philosophical dialogue with Kant.

Having a Sensible World in View: McDowell and Sellars on Perceptual Experience

Philosophical Books, 2010

's recent collection of essays, Having the World in View: Essays on Kant, Hegel, and Sellars is a penetrating work that builds upon insights from Kant, Hegel, and Sellars in order to articulate "an idealism that does not diverge from common-sense realism," a view according to which "thought and the world must be understood together" (p. 143). 1 The essays not only provide important critical interpretations of the views of the three mentioned philosophers, conducted by means of analyses characterized by a depth and originality that have already made them indispensable reading for anyone interested in those thinkers. They simultaneously do so in a way that provides substantial support for McDowell's own wide-ranging philosophical outlook, which will be familiar to most readers from his deservedly influential book, Mind and World (Harvard, 1994). McDowell argues that the insights from Kant, Hegel, and Sellars should enable us to see that certain perennial philosophical difficulties concerning how thought is related to empirical reality are in fact based on mistaken, noncompulsory views about the nature of intentionality in general, and about the relationship between free human rationality and passive sensory intake from the world in particular. In what follows I first highlight some central issues that reappear throughout the essays, and then I raise some questions concerning issues both internal to McDowell's account and in relation to the ways in which his views clash with those of Sellars in particular. But here at the outset let me say that the work required to 'think one's way into' McDowell's essays certainly repays the effort. I The title of the first essay, "Sellars on Perceptual Experience," introduces a general topic that frequently reappears throughout the volume not only in relation to Sellars but as a way for McDowell to articulate his own views and